


Coming Out

by shades



Series: HubMor [1]
Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: F/F, F/M, Families of Choice, Iron Girder Strikes Again, M/M, queer communities
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-03
Updated: 2017-02-03
Packaged: 2018-09-21 16:53:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9558188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shades/pseuds/shades
Summary: The winds of change are blowing through Ankh-Morpork, carrying more than the distinctlyorganicsmells of Harry King's compound.In which: Iron Girder Gathers the Nest, The Shades - Ruminations on Types of Thievery, Pruning the Urban Jungle, Nobby Nobs Dates Above his Station; Apparel and the Many Uses Thereof, Taffeta Emergency!, A Discussion of Things to Come





	

**Author's Note:**

> Many many thanks to [doozerdoodles](http://archiveofourown.org/users/doozerdoodles/pseuds/doozerdoodles) for the beta - I can't believe we've been writing/squealing together for >10 years, but we're fandom grannies now. Come sit next to me in my rocker.

It happened, like so many things did, because of the railway.

 

Iron Girder and her legion of children crisscrossed huge swaths of the Disc, bringing people here, and there, and everywhere, but mostly She brought them to Ankh-Morpork.  And like it had always been, the oddballs, the misfits, and the dangerously different were the first to step away from small town pasts and small town horrors. They found their way to the railway and, eventually, to the echoing marble halls of the A-M terminus, where late afternoon light spilled in long, cathedral lines across swarms of people who wonderfully didn’t see them, didn’t care about them, and mostly just wanted them to stop gawking up at the vaulted ceilings and _move along;_ some people had a train to catch, bloody _tourists._

 

So, like it is for those that believe they’re alone and unwanted in the world, they found each other little by little, scattered drops of quicksilver running together into something like a community.  And with that, the loneliness began to peel away like the petals of a blooming flower.  When people realized they weren’t stranded on a deserted island, that they had all been on the same island together, staring out at the same terrifying sea, the shame wilted away and pride grew up through its ashes.

 

And that was one of the Beginnings.

 

*

 

“It’s impossible to get a decent flat outside the Shades,” one young man said to another one night deep in their pints in the Mended Drum.  His name was Jacob Tallfellow, though it had not always been.  His father had been a cabbage wrangler, and had expected his daughter, Jacqueline, to grow up and marry a sensible boy from down the road, whose father had a decent share in a turnip mill.  What he had gotten, to his surprise, was a self-proclaimed son that painted beautiful canvases, which clenched your heart to look at them.  Cabbages are generally uncomplicated, and his father had been used to uncomplicated things, and so naturally this lead to shouting and tears and disowning, and eventually, the newly minted Jacob found himself penniless in Ankh-Morpork, sleeping on various couches and saving up to buy canvas and paint.

 

His companion, Andrew Malarky, was currently letting him sleep on the spare five feet of his tenement flat, having found Jacob keeping back tears as he was told by yet another boarding house that the price was either too high or _his kind_ was most definitely unwelcome.  

 

Andrew rolled his eyes expressively and sipped from an outrageously colored drink.  Andrew, while he’d had the fortune to have that name from birth, was unlucky enough to speak a certain way and walk a certain way that had made his lumberjack father red in the face.  His father had tried with absolutely no success to set him up with every fair maiden* in the town**.  Once Andrew had been caught _en flagrante_ with a stable hand from one town over, his father had done him the courtesy of breaking his arm for him before shoving him out of the house, with only the small bag of coins his weeping mother had pressed into his hands.

*Well, they might have been maidens, but the winter is long and in the densely forested woodland that Andrew hailed from, there were innumerable hidden places where maidens got up to things more suited to Missuses or, possibly, madams.

**The maidens in question would be the first to contest this, as they came away from these dates with their dresses fixed just so and their make-up brighter and more alluring, and the ability to knot cherry stems with their tongues, all of which sounded rather successful to them 

 

“Don’t have to tell me, sweetheart,” Andrew sighed, looking down at his lacquered nails. “It’s a crime, and that’s without all the unlicensed thieves roaming around of all hours.”

 

“You know, though, I noticed the old factory district is closing up a lot of their warehouses and production lines,” Jacob said thoughtfully.  “They’re all moving out to get closer to the freight stops for the railway.  Cheaper rent outside the city, and all. So that part of the city’s just…emptying out.”

 

Andrew raised his eyebrows.  “Whereabouts?”

 

“Morpork, Hubwards side,” Jacob said thoughtfully.  “You know, I bet they’re renting those warehouses out for a pittance.  Everyone’s moving jobs out of the city.  It’s in the Times every Sunday, letters to the editor and such.”

 

“Pittance is more than we’ve got,” Andrew said, waving down the waiter for another round of drink.*

*It’s a well known fact that even while sleeping on floors, eating instant Agatean noodles, and fighting cockroaches for scraps, everyone has enough coin for just one more round of drinks.

 

“I don’t know,” Jacob said, the growing fog of alcohol loosening his creative sluices.  “I mean, we know that Euphoria Watts and her girl - what’s her name - Alkaline Parker are looking for a new place.  And since Thorson Skullbreaker took up with Garnet, both their parents have tossed them out.  He’s still got a job at the railhead, and Garnet is working down that troll lingerie place, so they’ve at least got some coin coming in.”

 

“It’s a warehouse, though, love,” Andrew said, biting cherries off the spear remaining in his empty glass.  “We’ll freeze.”

 

“Nah, come on, one of the lads I know from the art supply store has carpenter training, he’d probably help us out, maybe.”  Jacob looked thoughtful.  “You know, none of the posh galleries up in Ankh will show our stuff, let alone the AM Art Museum.  If we…I don’t know.  What if we turned the upstairs into flats, and use the downstairs for art shows, maybe.  You could start a boutique like you’re always saying, sell some of your dresses.”

 

“Gowns, my love, they’re gowns,” Andrew said, as one might if they’ve made the correction many times before.  

 

“Right, right, gowns - and I know that Sacrilege Warner would like a place to read her poetry, and you can’t throw a brick without hitting someone in a Music With Rocks In band these days.  We could find people to fill up the space, make it affordable.  God knows it would be better than sweating in that little hovel of yours all summer.”

 

“Horses sweat,” Andrew said lightly, although a glint in his eye said Jacob had caught his attention, “I perspire.”  He leaned across the table, crossing his arms.  “We’d need a pub, though.  No sense moving somewhere where we wouldn’t have a local.”

 

Jacob waved this away.  “Pubs are like mushrooms in this town, they sprout up wherever there’s enough bullshit to support them.”

 

“Well, with Sacrilege’s poetry, we wouldn’t have to wait long, would we?”

 

And another beginning, well, began.

 

*

 

It became, in the weeks and months that followed, known as HubMor, for the simple reason that it occupied the most Hubwards side of Morpork, in the dense urban jungle of warehouses and old factories, whose dust had been pushed aside to make way for a hodgepodge of restaurants and galleries.  It was also called the Hamlet, as its denizens were a tightly aligned group of people, defensive of their little slice of Oi Dong*. And it was also called Kelsey, for reasons no one seemed entirely sure of**

*In other worlds, this might have been called Tir-Na-Nog, or possibly Shangri-La.

**In fact, HubMor, The Hamlet, and Kelsey were three different micro-neighborhoods, or one was a smaller part of the others, or they were all the same neighborhood, but the namesake changed on alternate Octodays - the definition seemed designed to bewilder outsiders.***

***As any urbanite [can attest to](http://mashable.com/2016/09/19/new-york-bombing-reactions/#KL7tGfi6CsqS), completely normal individuals who would have trouble picking out different continents on a map would argue heatedly about the bounds of various neighborhoods in their own city, and laugh with derision at anyone who got it wrong by mere inches.

 

So the dusty old machine shops were given a coat of paint.  Garish shopfronts opened, twinkling with glitter and a kaleidoscope of colors, and a whole population roosted in apartments with exposed brick walls and tall, warehouse ceilings.

 

At first it perplexed the more mundane Anhk Morporkians, who watched this new buzz of activity saying, “What do they need their own place for, anyway? Who do they think they are, eh?  Too good for the Shades, like hell they are.”  There were, on more than one occasion, bottles and bricks thrown through brand new storefront windows, and words scrabbled in paint on bar facades.*

*It should be surprising, but it is the sad state of humanity that scathing and disgusting words were invented as rapidly as relationships other than same-species, opposite-sex evolved**

**For some reason, this sort of language is learned very quickly by a sorry sort of bastard, all too common in the world, but the very same bastard would be quick to say that he just can’t keep up with the “politically correct” words that the subject of his multitude of slurs would prefer.  This is known as ignorance.

 

While it was not so easy to put a firm end to it, a number of Op-Eds in the Times and several well-placed eyebrow raises by the Patrician stemmed the tide.  After a particularly vicious and cruel assault took place on a young man named Gibbous Green, who’d done nothing other than walk out of the wrong sort of bar with the wrong sort of date one evening in spring, the Watch took a hard stand.  Commander Vimes, who seemed happy enough to never know what anyone did behind their bedroom doors, said that should anyone ever so much as bloody the nose of a member of that newest of Anhk-Morpork’s tribe, that person would soon find themselves in the Tanty, awaiting a fitting for a hemp collar.  

 

At the heart of it all was a pub. It was called, in deference to the old kiln in which it was set up, The Brickwall Tavern.  

 

“It’s a bit colorful, Nobby,” Sergeant Colon said one afternoon, proceeding down Tenpenny Road in the heat of a late summer afternoon.  

 

“Oh, yeah, Sarge,” Nobby agreed, bobbing his head.  The Brickwall Tavern was a riot of colors, rainbow flags and banners adorning every inch of the facade.  “But, they do a decent sausage-inna-bun, and nobody gets sniffy whens I takes Shine of the Rainbow there.  You know ‘ow it is, Sarge,” Nobby said mournfully, “Some people just don’t want to see her with me.  They says it’s dye-loot-ing a pure and noble line.”

 

“I didn’t know Shine of the Rainbow was a nob, Nobby.”

 

“Oh, yeah, Sarge, her da was a big Goblin up in the mountains.  But she says I shouldn’t listen.  And there’s this group of men - I mean, a group of ladies that’s traveling here from XXXX.  They have some right smart dresses, those girls, and someone was giving us lip only last week, and Priscilla kicked him so hard in the fork that she broke a heel, Sarge.”

 

“A very definite sort of woman,” Sarge said faintly, impressed despite himself as a ma - a woman taller and broader than Captain Carrot sashayed out of The Brickwall Tavern in heels so high they may as well be stilts and a dress that could politely only be called diaphanous.  

 

“And they’ve even got their own footie team now,” said Sergeant Colon, sounding thoughtful. “The HubMor Heathens.  Practically makes it a real place, that.”

 

“Yeah, even if there was a bit of a stink about the uniforms,” said Nobby. “Mind, Shatta did those for free, and I says any kit that glitters so much it could blind the opposition at a hundred yards is fine by me.  Fair’s fair.*”

*This, of course, was faint praise.  A ruling on fairness from C.W. St John Nobs was unlikely to convince anyone, anywhere, even small things that in smears on rocks at the bottom of caves, of its veracity.  Nobby had been known to walk off a foot-the-ball pitch with the other teams cleats, shin guards, jockstraps, and - in several instances - gold teeth.  There were even several fouls named after him, of which he felt quite proud.

 

Ahead of them, a very young dwarf was walking between two human men, holding each of their hands tightly, and babbling in the way that busy and focused way toddlers have.  It was little enough that its beard was barely peach fuzz, its tiny baby helmet hanging over its ears in a truly adorable fashion.  One man leaned across to kiss the other in a distracted and routine kind of way, just like a normal couple, Sergeant Colon thought.  There had been a mining disaster in Copperhead only a few months before, and with so many Dwarfish couples still working in the mines together, there had been altogether too many orphans.  

 

One of the men swung the child up onto his hip and laughed at his... what was the right word?  The churches were stuffily condemning such arrangements, but churches always needed something to complain about - it kept them relevant.  In fact, Colon knew that Archchancellor Munstrum Ridcully* had officiated more than one of these...well, it was only fair to call them marriages.  The man looked over at his almost-certainly-husband with a smile, and the child trilled with laughter as it threw its arms around its father’s neck.  

*Who, having beaten back the hideous terrors of the Dungeon Dimension on more than one occasion, actually knew what “repulsive” and “unnatural” meant in an up-close, is-that-a-fanged-tentacle-in-your-pocket-or-are-you-just-happy-to-see-me kind of way.  Besides, a wizard always loves a good excuse to wear a robe with sequins on and eat and drink until he was sick.  

 

The sargent, thinking of his own grandchildren, and the great grandchildren on the way, cleared his throat and shook his head.  “Well, Nobby, takes all kinds, doesn’t it just.”

 

They moved on, the flags of the Brickwall Tavern snapping in the breeze behind him.  

 

*

 

It was one of those small, awful hours of the night that comes after the last pub closes, but before the first inches of dawn spilled across the Disc. Extracting himself from the lovely young woman occupying his bed, and throwing on a thick robe against the morning chill, Jacob made his way cursing to the knocking on his door.

 

His loft was a lovely, echoing old space, full of light and half finished canvases, but at the moment he wished he lived up a pole in the desert, or at least in a somewhat less fashionable part of town were Andrew was unlikely to follow him.

 

“I will say this once more, Andrew,” he said as he opened the door.  “There is no such thing as a taffeta emergency.”

 

“There is if you’re in the final run-up to Quirm fashion week,” Andrew said busily, striding right past him into the flat.  He picked up a half empty wine bottle from the floor by the sofas and took a generous slug.  He lifted an eyebrow when he spotted the inviting lump in his sheets.  “Oh Jacob, you whore, who’s the lucky girl?”

 

“Shut it, Andrew,” the lump called back, curling up tighter.

 

“Yelena, is that you?”  Andrew rolled his eyes.  “She’s barely been tending bar at Brickwall a week, you old dog.  Let the girl get her bearings before you lead her to a life of sin and depravity.”

 

“Sin and depravity is what got me a oneway ticket to this whore’s town,” Yelena called back, “For gods’ sake, keep it down.  Some of us have got a headache.”

 

“Drinking this horse piss, I don’t doubt it,” Andrew said despairingly, as he threw back another swallow.  “Jacob, I’ve had an idea.”

 

“Lovely,” Jacob said, poking the coals in the retrofitted fireplace back into life and setting up a pot of coffee.  “Go and have it somewhere else, possibly somewhere during daylight.  What do you say?”

 

“Don’t be a fool.  Can I sit on this couch, or do you need to disinfect it first?”

 

“Andrew. I had a lovely night last night, thank you Yelena,” he called over his shoulder.  

 

Yelena extended one long, tattooed arm from the pile of blankets in a flourish, “Pleasure’s all mine.”

 

“ - and so I’d like to go on having a lovely morning.  A morning, I might add, which I had hoped would not be starting for several more hours.”

 

“Do you know what the dwarves and trolls and even the damn Black Ribboners have that we don’t?” Andrew asked, poking through Jacob’s shelves until he’d found another bottle of wine and three glasses.

 

“Decent friends?  Better front door security?  A modicum of decorum?” he added, as Andrew shamelessly sat down on the foot of Jacob’s bed and passed a glass of wine to Yelena, who was begrudgingly sitting up, accepting it as she let the sheets pool around her hips.

 

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, put those away,” Andrew said, grimacing.  

 

“Hi, hello, I’ve a right to be here in whatever level of dress I so desire, you walking stereotype you,” Yelena said, but not without a smile.  “They don’t bite, and if they send you on your merry way a bit faster, more’s the better.”

 

Andrew put a wounded hand to his chest.  “Honestly, you’d make me think I was unwelcome.”

 

“You’re very welcome,” said Andrew, taking the proffered glass of wine.  Outside, the sun was making its first sluggish appearance of the day, “You’re welcome to leave.”

 

“Tsk tsk tsk,” Andrew said, “Here’s me with another stroke of brilliance and nothing but sass from my dearest friends.”

 

“We met last Sunday,” Yelena yawned.  “You called my shoes tacky and bought me something called a sloppy blowjob down at the Brick.”  At Jacob’s harassed expression, Yelena rolled her eyes.  “A drink, love.  It was purple.”

 

“Andrew,” Jacob sighed, knowing that this was the fastest way out, “What is your brilliant idea?”

 

Andrew grinning, tapping his neon green fingernails against the cheap glassware,  “What we need, my dear pets, is a parade.”

**Author's Note:**

> So this is my love song for queer communities and SoHo/The Village/Chelsea and Ankh Morpork moving along with the times. 
> 
> This is the first part of what will hopefully a series about the denizens of HubMor and how it fits in with the rest of the Disc and all its many and varied inhabitants. If you've got any requests, please please shoot them [my way](https://allthingsmustfall.tumblr.com)
> 
> In my head, the completed A-M Terminus is [Grand Central Station](https://shrineodreams.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/gcs_nytransit-museum.jpg) in the good ole days


End file.
